Celebrating Bubble Tea

Google's collection of doodles is often the source of delightful little games that I never expected to play. The minigame-stuffed quasi-RPG that coincided with the Olympics was a massive standout in that regard, and set a bar I'm excited to see the doodle team surpass someday. However, not every doodle game is quite so fleshed-out, with most lasting no more than a few minutes. This short runtime isn't a bad thing though and actually fits the format really well. Celebrating Bubble Tea is a great example of this, fulfilling its role as a doodle game in just five short challenges.

In Celebrating Bubble Tea, you act as the owner of a little bubble tea cart and have to fulfill five increasingly precise orders of bubble tea for a cast of colorful characters, most of which you may find familiar if you've interacted with other doodles before. For each order, you're told how much boba, tea, and syrup (or maybe creamer? I don't drink much bubble tea myself) to add to each order via a dashed line across the cup. All you need to do is press and hold on the screen to start dispensing and let go to stop. However, there is a slight delay between when you let go and when the pouring actually stops that you need to account for if you want to earn those stars. Stars are earned by stopping your pour within the dashed line, which gets skinnier for each order.

Whether or not you earn all of the stars though, you'll have a happy customer (or four) walking back into the soothing rain with their new bubble tea. I think that kind of encapsulates the whole mood of the doodle too. Whether or not you make it perfectly, each bubble tea goes to someone who'll enjoy it, and it's fun to make. The calm, joyful music, the steady sound of rain, and the familiar faces all make Celebrating Bubble Tea an enchanting experience, even if it only lasts for a couple of minutes. While some interactive Google doodles are great at relaying the importance of their subject by explaining the history behind it, the same goal was achieved here by cultivating an atmosphere, and I loved it.

The game is available online here (as of 3/20/23): https://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-bubble-tea

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